Right Thinking from the Left Coast

Tag: Media

I have a few long-form posts cooking. But a quick hit tonight: Montana Republican candidate Greg Gianforte reportedly attacked a reporter tonight. Grabbed him by the neck and body-slammed him after being a question about the CBOs score of the GOP healthcare plan. The local Fox News affiliate has confirmed the account and audio tape released sure sounds consistent with the reporter’s account (and not the candidate’s statement).

Gianforte is an unexpectedly close race and the Democrats are hoping to pick this up on the way to a 2018 landslide. We’ll see (their fundraising has been poor of late). Gianforte could still win since most ballots have been cast and it may take a while for this to sink in. But we can’t have politicians literally assaulting reporters for asking routine questions. If Gianforte wins and is later charged for his actions tonight, he should resign.

Veteran TV journalist Ted Koppel analyzed the media’s role in the political divide in Trump-era America on “CBS Sunday Morning” — and had a pointed moment interviewing Fox News host Sean Hannity.

“We have to give some credit to the American people that they are somewhat intelligent and that they know the difference between an opinion show and a news show,” Hannity told Koppel on camera, registering the veteran newsman’s doubt. “You’re cynical. … You think we’re bad for America? You think I’m bad for America?”

“Yep,” Koppel replied. “In the long haul, I think that all these opinion shows…”

“Really?” Hannity asked. “That’s sad, Ted.”

Koppel explained: “You know why? Because you’re very good at what you did and because you have attracted … people who have determined that ideology is more important than facts.”

I’m not a fan of Koppel and I think the cause he went on to blame for this problem — the demise of the Fairness Doctrine — is horribly misguided. But I think he has a point on Hannity and talk radio/TV in general.

Last year, Conor Friedersdorf wrote a great article on how talk radio precipitated the rise of Donald Trump:

Here are some of the cues and signals that even anti-Trump members of “the party” have sent to voters, over many years, that made the rise of a populist demagogue possible if not likely, and that Trump voters absorbed into their world views:

Career politicians cannot be trusted. This widespread conceit in “the party” has effectively made it impossible for candidates with governing records and public sector experience to be accepted by large swaths of GOP primary voters.

When the base doesn’t get what it wants, it is because of betrayal by party elites, never because a majority of Americans disagree with what the base wants.

Rhetorical stridency is a better heuristic for loyalty than core principles or governing record—and there is nothing disqualifying about extreme incivility (hence, for example, a buttoned up think tank giving a statesmanship award to Rush Limbaugh, a gleeful purveyor of bombastic insults).

Complaints about racism and sexism are always cynical fabrications, intended be used as cudgels against conservatives.
Political correctness in governance is one of the biggest problems facing America.

Illegal immigration poses an existential threat to America.

President Obama has deliberately made bad deals with foreign countries to weaken America.

If any movement conservatives in the #NeverTrump crowd doubt that “the party” has sent all of those signals or cues, I’ll gladly expound on any of them. Taken together, it’s easy to see why a majority of an electorate that bought into those premises would be more attracted to Trump than to anyone else in the GOP field.

I would add to that list the claim that global warming is a hoax, unemployment numbers are faked, there’s a War on Cops, that opposing anti-terror policies is siding with the terrorists, that tax cuts pay for themselves, etc., etc. When people said “Trump says what no one else says” or “Trump tells it like it is” this is what they mean: that Trump reiterates the (often false) doomsday rhetoric of the conservative echoshere.

And now we’re reaping the results of this. Last week, we saw the utter immolation of Republican efforts to replace Obamacare. There are many authors of that disaster but a big one, as Josh Barro argues, was that Republicans spent years misleading the voters on Obamacare and pretending that healthcare reform was easy.

For years, Republicans promised lower premiums, lower deductibles, lower co-payments, lower taxes, lower government expenditure, more choice, the restoration of the $700 billion that President Barack Obama heartlessly cut out of Medicare because he hated old people, and (in the particular case of the Republican who recently became president) “insurance for everybody” that is “much less expensive and much better” than what they have today.

They were lying. Over and over and over and over, Republicans lied to the American public about healthcare.

To be fair, many Republican politicians understood there would be trade-offs and crafted policies around those. But those policies were never implemented because the Republican base believed that Obamacare had to be repealed instantly, replacement or no replacement. Friedersdorf lays the blame for that on the commentariat:

Still, even the insight that Republicans spent years willfully obscuring the tradeoffs involved in health-care policy doesn’t fully explain the last week. Focusing on GOP officials leaves out yet another important actor in this debacle: the right-wing media. By that, I do not mean every right-leaning writer or publication. Over the last eight years, lots of responsibly written critiques of Obamacare have been published in numerous publications, and folks reading the aforementioned wonks, or Peter Suderman at Reason, or Yuval Levin, or Megan McArdle at Bloomberg, stayed reasonably grounded in actual shortcomings of Obamacare.

In contrast, Fox News viewers who watched entertainers like Glenn Beck, talk-radio listeners who tuned into hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and consumers of web journalism who turned to sites like Breitbart weren’t merely misled about health-care tradeoffs.

They were told a bunch of crazy nonsense.

He lists hysterical claim after hysterical claim. Death panels, forced fat camps, depression, slavery, the end of individual liberty. There were and are plenty of problems with Obamacare. But claiming it was the end of America was ridiculous.

The problem is not conservatives nor conservatism. The problem is faux conservatives like Hannity and Limbaugh and every other joker out there who has no solutions, no answers, no philosophy, no ideas … just acres of doom and gloom and anger. Conor talks about his grandmother, who spent her last years terrified by what she was hearing from right wing hacks like Hannity. I see it in my Trump-supporting relatives, who hear a constant deluge from Fox News about how doomed America is and how awful the Democrats are. It’s incredible disheartening. And it angers me to think of these jokers making millions by convincing millions of Americans that the end is nigh.

I don’t mean to downplay real concerns, which are legion. We are in a lot of debt. Obamacare is staggering around, avoiding a death spiral only because of subsidies. Crime appears to have spiked, especially in certain cities. Rural areas are hurting badly (see my earlier post on the opioid epidemic).

But lately the conservative commentariat has no ideas for how to deal with these problems. Only a steady diet of doom and gloom, blame-storming and uncompromising rhetoric. And yes, this is bad for country. It makes people fearful who have no need to be and it instills an us-vs-them mentality, turning people we disagree with into hideous villains who hate America.

It was not always so. Friedersdorf is a bit too young to remember but in the 90’s, there’s no question in my mind that talk radio hosts like Hannity and Limbaugh were a good thing. They served as a critical counter-weight to a very liberal media. Their broadcasts played a big role in the Republican revolution of 1994, the subsequent balancing of the budget, the passing of NAFTA and the destruction of numerous corrupt politicians.

However, something changed in the aughts. I’m not sure why exactly — I suspect it was 9/11. But the tone of conservative commentary began to be less positive and more negative. Liberals stopped being mocked and started being demonized. I stopped listening to Limbaugh because his show, which has always left me feeling upbeat and inspired, became a huge downer. Everything was awful. America was going to hell. Compromise was a bad word. And now we’re at the apotheosis of this: a Republican party that can’t get anything done because they can’t approach issues in any kind of a realistic way.

That’s not to let liberals off the hook here. It wasn’t conservatives who called half the country “deplorables”. It’s not conservatives who are writing off half the electorate as evil racist sexist monsters for having voted Trump. But liberal idiocy does not make conservative idiocy OK. No matter how bad the commentary on the Left gets, that does not excuse Hannity for being a demagogue who has worsened the debate.

I don’t know that there’s a fix for this. My gut feeling is that we are in the grip of a national fever of partisanship that has yet to exhaust itself. But I do want address one supposed “cure”, which I referenced above, because it’s becoming a bigger liberal talking point these days.

Koppel blamed talk radio on the end of the Fairness Doctrine, the FCC policy that Reagan killed in 1987 that had previously forced television and radio stations to present “both sides” of an issue.

Put bluntly, the Fairness Doctrine was an awful policy and it should stay dead. The only reason we should ever dig it up is to put a stake through its heart and make sure it stays dead. Consider:

The Fairness Doctrine was blatantly unconstitutional piece of garbage, no matter what the Supreme Court said. Having the government dictate what constitutes “fairness” in commentary is an invitation to abuse. And indeed, Limbaugh, in one of his books, noted several times where politicians — including Nixon — used the Fairness Doctrine to bludgeon commentators into shutting up about issues the politicians didn’t want discussed.

This is why Fairness Doctrines have long been rejected for newspapers and print media, despite the long history of partisan commentary therein (Thomas Paine was not known for his “Fairness”). The justification for the Fairness Doctrine the last time it was upheld was that radio and TV media are limited to only so many channels. So the government has to ensure that all views are represented. This view is nonsense, of course. Most cities have one, maybe two newspapers, both of which are liberal. By contrast, TV has innumerable stations, some of which — MSNBC, for example — are decisively liberal. In that light, the Fairness Doctrine is one of the most liberal of things: a solution running around in search of a problem.

People who want government to do things never seem to consider that the powers they give government could be turned against them. Let me ask you something, Fairness Doctrine-supporting liberals: do you really want to give that kind of censorship power to Donald Fucking Trump?! Does it never occur to you that he might decide that “Fairness” dictates that Samantha Bee needs to make more jokes about Democrats or SNL needs to mock Nancy Pelosi more? Can you, for once, consider what government power will look like in the hands of people you don’t like?

The Fairness Doctrine is not going to magically create a more skeptical and reasonable populace. This is an appeal to government policy as magic.

Ultimately, the Fairness Doctrine plugs into the Ultimate Progressive Conceit: progressives’ firm belief that they are the only reasonable people in the room; and that if people disagree with them it’s only because they’ve been brainwashed by nefarious forces. This is an outgrowth of the Marxism that underpins much of liberal thought. The Marxists maintained that Marxism was as scientifically proven as the Law of Gravity and, if anyone disagreed, it was because they were mentally ill or had been brainwashed by bourgeoisie interests.

But that is never the case. People disagree with Progressive ideas because they disagree with them. Sometimes it’s because the progressives have the facts wrong. Sometimes it’s because progressives’ logic is poor. Sometimes it’s because progressives are being irrational and stupid. And sometimes — most often — it’s because people disagree with progressives on values (e.g., progressives think it’s “fair” to take money from rich people and give it to power people; many conservatives think that’s the definition of unfair).

I am very concerned about the nihilist direction conservatism has taken. And I think that Sean Hannity and his ilk have played a large role in that and, yes, I think he’s been bad for the country in some ways. One can not behold the election of Trump and not be concerned with the direction we’re going.

But getting government more involved is not the answer. If you really think Trump is fascist, why on Earth would you give him the tools to implement fascism?

So yesterday, the internet erupted with claims that Donald Trump had threatened to invade Mexico and had a testy phone call with the Prime Minister of Australia. I tweeted a little bit about but was a bit skeptical. But I did keep my policy on blogging about Trump-related news, which is this:

I will not blog about anything bad Trump supposedly does until it is confirmed, either by audio, video or in writing. I do this for my own sanity, if not for the sake of the debate.

To give you an example, I tweeted and blogged very quickly about last weekend’s airport debacle because it was obviously real. People were being detained and sent back, an EO had gone out, Whitehouse spokesmen had gone on record that it applied to green card holders. But I didn’t blog about rumors about an anti-LGBT EO that was supposedly on the way because it was all anonymous sourcing.

Now it turns out that the Australia phone call was a bit overblown. Trump is upset about the deal to send 1250 refugees here. But we have no idea how often world leaders get into these sort of tiffs and the Australian PM downplayed it. Trump took to Twitter to complain and it does appear he lashed out at the PM in some fashion. So it’s a bit concerning, but not exactly the start of a war. Meanwhile, Mexican and US authorities have denied that the phone call was confrontational and the transcript indicates that his “threat” to send troops down there was more of light-hearted joke and both sides saw it as such.

This is becoming a very big problem in the Trump Era. Things have moved very fast for the last two weeks. And, unfortunately, there has developed a tendency for the entire internet to jump at shadows. Garbage stories flourish with thousands of retweets and posts. The corrections are buried. The opposition is losing their damned minds, freaking out over everything Trump supposedly does only to find out later that at least half of it was fake news.

There are now dozens of Twitter accounts claiming to be “rogue” accounts inside NASA, the Parks Service and even the White House itself. There is zero evidence that these accounts are anything but trolls. In fact, one Tweeter contends that the spelling and diction indicate they are being run out of Russia (and Trump thought Putin was his friend). And yet these unsourced unreliable accounts have thousands of followers and every time they tweet something that confirms liberal biases, they get tens of thousands of retweets. Anonymous sourcing is taken as gospel. Rumors become headline news. It’s insane. It’s exhausting. It’s so discrediting that many people think it’s Trump’s team doing it to make the media look unreliable.

I realize that Trump scares a lot of people (including me). But if you turn the volume up to 11 on every whisper of malfeasance, you will exhaust yourself and everyone else. People who support Trump or are in the middle or are not political junkies will tune out. It’s not like there’s a shortage of real stuff to get mad about.

During the Obama years, I cautioned against screaming over everything he did. The same goes double for Trump. Focus on the bad stuff that’s real, not rumors. Support him when he does something right. Don’t burn your energy up and exhaust the nation chasing phantoms.

Trump has been in office for one week, but it’s an eventful one. Before I get into the heavy stuff, I wanted to take a second to note that, on occasion, we all need to take a deep breath. Yes, some of the things he’s already done are misguided and some of his proposals are poor. He’s showing an alarming egotism and disregard for existing institutions, the law and the Constitution.

But … we’ve got 1460 days of this (at least). It’s important to figure out what to be alarmed by and what not to be alarmed by. Ken White has a great post on this, pointing out that the media and the American people have a tendency to react to stories of government abuse as though they are unprecedented, mainly because they weren’t paying attention while a President they liked was the in the Oval Office.

The urge to indulge in this habit under the thoroughly loathsome Trump Administration is overpowering. Trump and his underlings are scornful of rights and openly fantasize about abusing them. They require dedicated scrutiny. But not every ugly thing that happens now is the result of a Trumpism. Take, for instance, the concern about members of the press being arrested at anti-Trump protests. We should absolutely be vigilant for signs of the criminal justice system being abused to suppress the press and dissent. But cops have always indiscriminately arrested people at protests — including journalists — and falsified masses of improbable riot or assault or obstruction charges afterwards. Reporters have been charged plenty of times before. Sometimes it’s a reflection of law enforcement’s indiscriminate approach to arrests at protests and sometimes it’s a reflection of entrenched law enforcement hostility to press scrutiny. Is the latest incident actually a change — or is the press just noticing because this time they got caught up in it, and they are primed to expect tyranny?

Examples are legion, and not just in the criminal justice arena. Every day you’ll see old policies being cited as new Trump atrocities. Before it happened to Obama, and Bush, and so on ad infinitum.

I’ve decided to impose a 12-hour moratorium on tweeting or blogging any Trump outrage (unless it is something said or done by Trump or his surrogates). Because we’ve developed a huge problem with identifying real Trump outrages from phony ones. Just a few examples

Last week, the internet erupted because Trump had “scrubbed” pages from the White House website on climate change and LGBT rights. But it turned out that this was not unusual. When Trump assumed office, all of Obama’s web pages were moved to a new site and the only pages that went up were ones Trump’s team had put together. You could complain that this means LGBT rights and climate change are not priorities with Trump (which we already knew). But saying they’d been “scrubbed” was ignorant.

A day later, the internet erupted because Trump had declared his inauguration day a “National Day Of Patriotic Devotion”. This was creepy, but … Obama declared his to be a “National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation”. So this was ultimately much ado about nothing.

Yesterday, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists advanced the “Doomsday Clock” to 2.5 minutes to midnight. This is utterly meaningless.

Yesterday, the internet also erupted because several senior State Department staff resigned. This is a bit alarming because Trump has not filled almost all the senior positions at State (and even the most ardent small-government conservative would admit that foreign relations are the Federal Government’s job). But, as Alex noted, the resignations were not unusual or unprecedented. In fact, most senior government officials resign when a new Administration takes office. Some are just held on for continuity.

There’s been a bit of hubbub over the Administration telling government scientists not to communicate with the public. It’s not clear how common this is or how extensive. I am very concerned that the Administration may be politicizing science. But this is not unprecedented — the previous Administration was more than happy to indulge in pseudo-scientific trafficking “studies”. For the moment, I am holding back on a full-scale blast until it’s clear what’s going on.

The problem with these pseudo- or semi-controversies is that they obscure really bad stuff the Administration is actually doing that is not in question at all. To wit:

Issuing an executive order last week that has HHS grant more waivers to insurance mandates under Obamacare. That may sounds good. But since insurance companies are still forbidden from blocking insurance due to pre-existing conditions, this is only going to enhance the insurance death spiral.

Wallowing in conspiracy theories about voter fraud. Trump is obsessed with his popularity and is now proposing a massive investigation into mythical millions of illegal aliens voting. If masses of illegal aliens voted in 2016, they were just as skilled as the mythical Russian hackers who supposedly stole the election for Trump. They somehow disguised themselves as well-established demographic trends, voted Republican down-ballot and concentrated all their power in California, which Clinton was going to win anyway. This fantasy of Trump’s ends in one place: a national ID card and national voter database.

Reopening CIA black sites and resuming torture. This was one of my biggest breaks with the Republican Party and remains so. The black sites create a space where torturers can operate outside of the law, outside of the Geneva convention and outside of the rules of war. And the CIA’s record in defense of their program — destroying evidence, lying to Congress, spying on Congress — is a huge black mark against them. Trump has decreed that torture “absolutely” works despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And whether it works or not, it is a violation of the law, our treaty obligations and basic human decency. He’s talking as though to defeat ISIS, we need to become ISIS.

Trump, a supposed Culture War moderate, restored the gag order that prevents NGO’s from getting money if they perform abortions or even counsel women about abortions. But he extended it further to all international health organizations, not just those involved with family planning. Organizations fighting HIV/AIDS could see their funding cut if they even mention abortion. (To be fair, this reeks of that Culture War dunderhead Pence. But Trump signed it, probably not knowing what he was signing.) This seemingly innocuous move could kill thousands, even potentially undoing Bush 43’s greatest legacy: the tremendous progress made in fighting AIDS in Africa.

Trump, as promised, banned immigration from several Muslim countries, including countries where we created the refugee crisis and applying even to people who helped us and are now at risk of retaliation. Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, the ban does not apply to countries where Trump has business interests.

He continued to make false claims about surging crime, saying DC and Philadelphia are experiencing huge surges in murder (they aren’t). He also threatened to send in the feds to deal with Chicago, which really is seeing a surge of violence. But as Radley Balko pointed out, the Feds already did look into Chicago and concluded that the policing culture, which includes such “politically correct” things as black sites, beatings, smashed dash cams and cover-ups, is the biggest problem.

Trump cancelled TPP, to the delight of China and the despair of the people who would have benefitted. And he’s now supporting a “border adjustment tax” that will spike the cost of consumer goods. Yesterday, it was touted as the way Mexico will pay for his stupid wall although it does not such thing. And his angry tweeting about Mexico caused the Mexican President to cancel a meeting — not a good thing for our third biggest trading partner.

Since I wrote the above, I’ve been trying to think of anything good Trump has done in the first week. He froze regulations, which is sorta good but there are few on things like airline safety that we kind of need. He froze government hiring, which is fine. He removed the ban on the Keystone Pipeline, which is fine, but not nearly the economic stimulus he thinks it will be. That’s pretty much it and all stuff we could have gotten out of a generic Republican sans the bullshit.

Look, there are bunch of you that support Trump. I get that. But you can’t claim that a man who wants political control of science, torture, baseless investigations into supposed voter fraud, hard restraints on immigration, a global gag order on abortion and a thousand other policies that clamp down on us is, in any way, a supporter of freedom or the Constitution. I said before the election that Trump had the makings of a thug. We’re only a week in but I’ve seen nothing to make me reassess that opinion.

For a long time, the Clinton supporters have been whining about the so-called Clinton Rules. These unspoken rules of media coverage are supposedly unfair to the Clintons. I list them below. But you’ll recognize quickly that these “rules” apply to everyone in public life and especially Republicans.

1) Everything, no matter how ludicrous-sounding, is worthy of a full investigation by federal agencies, Congress, the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and mainstream media outlets.

2) Every allegation, no matter how ludicrous, is believable until it can be proven completely and utterly false. And even then, it keeps a life of its own in the conservative media world.

Nonsense. The Vince Foster and Boys on the Tracks conspiracy theories were mocked and derided. The Lewinsky investigation was frequently denounced as an investigation of a blowjob, rather than an investigation of obstruction of justice. The current e-mail scandal keeps getting dismissed, no matter how many classified documents turn up. Benghazi has become a buzzword for liberals to dismiss any criticism of Obama or Clinton.

And for Republicans? Every intimation of misdeeds by George W. Bush was in the headlines. We’ve been enduring news cycle after news cycle probing Ben Carson’s biography, poking Marco Rubio’s finances, questioning Ted Cruz’s citizenship and breaking down Carly Fiorina’s track record.

3) The media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith until there’s hard evidence otherwise.

The media should assume all politicians are acting in bad faith until proven otherwise. And when it’s Republicans, they do. Every time there’s a shooting, the media tells us that Republicans are willing to see children get slaughtered in exchange for NRA campaign contributions. Opposition to Obamacare was derided as being in the employ of insurance companies (who, uh, supported the bill). Any opposition to “jobs bills” or big spending bills is attributed to the Republicans only caring about rich people. Never for a second is it allowed that conservative might disagree on how effective liberal policies are. No, it’s always because they are uncaring jackals who only want special interest money.

4) Everything is newsworthy because the Clintons are the equivalent of America’s royal family

Well … they are to start their second dynasty. And they never really left public life. They and their daughter are showered with millions in media contracts, speaking fees and donations to their fund. How is that not royalty?

5) Everything she does is fake and calculated for maximum political benefit

Again, we should assume this of all politicians. In fact, we just had a media storm over Marco Rubio repeating talking points where it was stated that everything he says is fake and calculated.

And we should especially assume that the Clintons are fake, given their long history of frequently and flagrantly lying their asses off. One day it’s a bogus story of sniper fire on an airport; the next it’s bogus allegations the the White House Travel Office was embezzling money; the next, it’s every lie imaginable on the campaign trail. And, when Clinton was President, they were well known for sliming their opponents, whether it was implying Monica Lewinski was a deranged stalker or leaking information about Alma Powell’s struggles with depression.

But the investigation into Clinton’s e-mail server has turned up something interesting. In exchange for access to her speech, the Clinton people were telling journalists what to write.

A set of emails has exposed a sordid, transactional relationship between Hillary Clinton and the press.

The emails were obtained by Gawker as part of a large Freedom of Information Act request it made back in 2012. They show a 2009 exchange between Marc Ambinder, then-politics editor of The Atlantic, and Philippe Reines, a close assistant and adviser to Clinton during her days as Secretary of State.

Ambinder asked Reines for an advance copy of a speech Clinton was scheduled to give at the Council on Foreign Relations. Rather than simply say yes or no, Reines cut a deal with Ambinder, turning over the speech provided Ambinder agreed to three conditions:

1) You in your own voice describe [the speech] as “muscular”

2) You note that a look at the CFR seating plan shows that all the envoys — from [Richard] Holbrooke to [George] Mitchell to [Dennis] Ross — will be arrayed in front of her, which in your own clever way you can say certainly not a coincidence and meant to convey something

3) You don’t say you were blackmailed!

Ambinder agrees in the exchange, and his subsequent article shows that he followed Reines’ demands to the letter. Clinton’s speech is dubbed “muscular” in the second sentence, and the suggestive arrangement of Holbrooke, Mitchell, and Ross is noted immediately afterward. Ambinder never reveals that he was fulfilling demands made by Reines. In essence, in return for a scoop, Ambinder allowed Clinton’s team to dictate part of his coverage.

I would bet very good money that is not the first nor the second nor the 500th time this has happened. Just last year, Vox ran an article complaining that the Clintons don’t “need” the press and it drives the press crazy. Of course, the press aren’t supposed to be political flacks for a powerful political dynasty; they’re supposed to be adversaries (reminder: Vox is the baby of Ezra Klein, who created the Journolist where some lefty media coordinated their propaganda coverage of Obama).

The idea that media are massively unfair to the Clinton is something believed mostly by the Clintons themselves and their sycophants. If the media really were out to get them, Clinton would be getting a grilling on her vote for the Iraq War, her intervention in Libya and her smearing of the women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct. Her poor management of the Health Care task force and her bumbling with Russia would be front page news. Her close ties with Wall Street wouldn’t have needed Bernie Sanders to be part of the conversation. Instead of real coverage, we are getting pre-planned talking points describing her speeches as muscular and a concerted effort to proclaim that she’s wildly popular, is winning every debate and is the most qualified Presidential candidate ever.

You know, I can’t imagine why people think the media has a liberal bias. I mean it’s not like they stealthily edit articles to remove politically damaging quotes from the President and then come up with multiple BS explanations when caught.

(In other news, the media are going nuts because PPP did a poll asking voters if we should bomb Agrabah. 30% of GOP voters agreed. But Agrabah is not a real place; it’s the fictional city in the movie Aladdin.

Here’s the thing. You have to read further in to find it (and some outlets elide it entirely). But 19% of Democrats agreed. Moreover, 57% of Republicans said they didn’t know if we should bomb a fictional country. But only 45% of Democrats said they didn’t know. In other words, Democrats were more sure that they knew whether or not to bomb a country that doesn’t exist.

This is also an illustration of why polls mean little. You can get 20% of people to agree to anything in a poll, just from trolling. So when you hear something like “20% of Republicans think the moon is made of green cheese”, add a lot of salt.)

So, someone enlighten me. After this weekend’s shootout in Waco between two biker gangs that left nine dead and 18 wounded, we started getting a bunch of think pieces from the usual liberal outlets about how the media coverage of this awfulness was “different”.

Those who are using what happened in Waco to start conversations about stereotypes and media biases against black people aren’t complaining about the tenor of this weekend’s media coverage. They’re saying something a little different: that by being pretty reasonable and sticking to the facts, this coverage highlights the absurdity of the language and analysis that have been deployed in other instances, when the accused criminals are black.

I have no idea what Vox is on about. The coverage of this weekend’s events was not very different from the coverage of any other violence. You can read Ed Morrissey here where he talks about the many politicians who have denounced these gangs, the efforts law enforcement has made to reign them in, the arrest of almost two hundred gang members and the efforts made to prevent this before the weekend even started. No one is downplaying this or pretending this isn’t a problem. No one is failing to denounce them as violent thugs. And no one is trying to claim that this event was somehow justified.

Another line of commentary that’s predictable in media coverage and commentary surrounding violence involving black people has to do with black cultural pathology.

Politicians and pundits are notorious for grasping for problems in African-American communities — especially fatherlessness — to explain the kind of violence that, when it happens in a white community, is treated as an isolated crime versus an indictment of an entire racial group’s way of life.

The total absence around the Waco incident of analysis of struggles and shortfalls within white families and communities is a painful reminder of this.

What a bunch of crap. The difference between violence in the black community and violence in the white community is scale. Black people are six times as likely to be murdered as white people and eight times likelier to be involved in a murder. The community in Waco is not nearly as dysfunctional and crime-ridden as Baltimore is. Saying that violence is more endemic to black communities than white ones isn’t racism; it’s a fact.

Now what we make of that fact, how we respond to it; that’s a different ballgame. Then it’s reasonable to discuss institutional racism, the collapse of families, the cycle of violence, the destruction of inner cities, the War on Drugs, etc. I also think it’s perfectly reasonable to question why people get involved in biker gangs or why the media tend to romanticize biker gangs and have previously failed to report on biker violence. But let’s not pretend that a shootout in Waco reflects violence in our nation the same way the constant drumbeat of death and destruction in our inner cities does (Baltimore, to make one example, has had 34 murders just since Freddie Gray died).

And frankly, outlets like Vox are in a glass house on this. They seem to think it’s wrong for conservatives to talk about absent fathers as a contributor to violence. But it’s OK to discuss racism, decaying infrastructure and failing schools?

But the key thing to understand is that the criticism here is not really of the coverage of what happened in Waco. It’s of the juxtaposition of what happened here with what happens when the people involved are of a different color. The message is not that the conversation about Waco should be overblown, hypercritical of an entire culture, or full of racial subtext. It’s despair over the sense that if the gang members were black, it almost certainly would be.

Bullshit. There are about thirty mass shootings a year in this country, many of them involving gang violence. Almost of all of them are ignored by the media. In fact, I expect think pieces next week about why the media doesn’t cover shootings between black gangs with the same intensity they covered this one.

Salon, of course, takes the cake, wondering why the events in Waco weren’t called a riot (mainly because … there wasn’t a riot). CNN wonders why we react to Muslim violence more sharply than biker violence (because no biker gang ever murdered 3000 people). NPR wonders why the National Guard wasn’t called out (because all the perpetrators were arrested and the violence finished on the first day).

You can read a response from National Review, that points out that the media has had no problem labeling riots as such when it involves white sports fans or college students.

And who, precisely, is denying that organized crime syndicates are thuggish? Isn’t that generally what is meant by “biker gang”? No one is arguing that these were the Wild Hogs.

I understand that people get frustrated when conservations about the excessive use of force by police or the militarization of police gets sidelined into discussion of black-on-black violence. It is possible to denounce both at the same time (as indeed most people do). But trying to sandwich media coverage of the Waco shooting into that discussion is a stretch at best.

Sorry, guys. This isn’t about the media. This is about a bunch of thugs who started a brawl that resulted in nine people being killed (including, most likely, several killed by the police trying to deal with the situation). No one is defending them. No one is romanticizing them. No one is pretending this was something other than a vile incident. And if the result is crackdowns on other violent gangs, almost everyone is fine with that.

Just a quick post today on guns. Or, rather, a link to a great post at the Federalist that details 14 things people should know before they write about guns. Excerpt:

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” may be widely mocked by ignorant gun controllers, but it’s true (also true is the fact that guns don’t kill people, bullets do, if we want to be really pedantic). A gun cannot load a magazine by itself. A gun cannot secure a loaded magazine by itself. An empty gun cannot chamber a round or rack the slide by itself. A gun cannot pull a trigger by itself. Each of these actions requires agency by a human being.

These are all reasons why I personally dislike the term “accidental” shooting, because it suggests a lack of accountability and responsibility. A more appropriate term is “negligent” shooting, since human action is required to load a magazine, secure the loaded magazine, chamber a round, and pull the trigger. It’s why the basic gun safety rules are so important: if followed religiously, they reduce the probability of negligent shootings to 0%.

Radley Balko has talked about this in the context of police shootings. The press coverage will frequently say something like “the officer’s gun discharged” as though the gun unholstered itself, undid its own safety, floated through the air and shot someone.

He also gets into supposed “safe gun” technology which is not terribly reliable and not nearly as useful as the gun rules that I and every other gun owners learned the second one was shown to us:

1. Treat all guns as though they are loaded.
2. Never point the muzzle at anything you don’t intend to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target and you’re prepared to fire.
4. Always confirm your target, as well as what’s in front, behind, and around it.

Each rule is effectively a backup in case you ignore a previous rule. If you always assume a gun is loaded, then you’ll never have to say, “Your Honor, I didn’t know it was loaded.” If you screw up the first rule, the rule #2 will prevent you from shooting someone unintentionally, because your muzzle will always be pointed in a safe direction. If you screw up the first and second rules, rule #3 will ensure that the weapon is never actually discharged. And in the event that you believe your life is in mortal danger, rule #4 will prevent you from firing on an individual who’s a non-threat, or prevent you from firing through a threat into an innocent person.

It’s good stuff for those of us who have been continually frustrated by incompetent media coverage and politicking on the subject of guns. If a Republican says anything remotely wrong about anything, he gets no end of shit about it. But Democrats and the media constantly make statements about guns that are equivalent to saying the Earth is flat.

One of the almost refreshing things to emerge from the Boston bombing was Ruslan Tsarni. Uncle Ruslan didn’t waste a moment in front of the cameras, blasting his nephews as losers, expressing his love for America and conveying his embarrassment for what had happened. It was rare to see someone not going with the default “more in sorrow than anger” mood that tends to characterize these events. He said what I think a lot of people were thinking.

By now, you’ve heard about the three girls who were imprisoned in a basement in Ohio. A video interview with the neighbor who discovered and rescued one of the girls is rapidly going viral. It is worth a watch as he expresses amazement and what happened and uncorks a number of great spontaneous lines (“I knew something was wrong when a little, pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway.”)

I was thinking about this in the car this morning and realized just why those two videos are so much fun. It’s because genuine emotion and spontaneous expression are so rarely shown in the media. Our culture has become relentlessly programmed and focus-group tested. From “reality TV” that isn’t real to movies that are statistically tweaked for mass appeal, there’s a whole industry out there designed to crush spontaneity.

Our politicians have become so sanitized and so on-message that they have made the Information Age boring as hell. Everyone has the same talking points, everyone is on a script. Barack Obama is the apotheosis of this: everything he says sounds it has been passed through the political equivalent of Autotune.

Yeah, America. Boo, cynicism. Government can’t solve everything but it can solve many things. Bipartisanship. It’s all Bush’s fault.

Of course, Obama also illustrates why the media has become so dominated by focus-group blahness. On the rare occasions when Obama does speak off the cuff, he often sticks his foot in it (red lines, bitter clingers, etc.)

Chris Christie is the opposite of this in many ways. He’s always saying what he thinks and, often, what everyone knows deep down. But his honesty is often a double-edged sword. The same statements that make conservatives cheer make liberals cringe. And when he earnestly praised Obama’s Sandy response, the outcry was fierce. Rand Paul is the same way, often saying exactly what he means and contradicting his own party. But this has also made him enemies on the Left, particularly with some of his bumbling comments on racial issues.

But, as human beings, we are far closer to the Christie/Paul model than we are to the Obama one. No one sees an event — whether it’s something trivial or something momentous — and carefully maps out their feelings. They react. Sometimes they overreact. Sometimes they say things they don’t really mean. Sometimes they say and do things that contradict what they really believe. But we’re not media creatures and never have been.

Tsarni and Ramsey are a great contrast against a media that’s constantly wringing its hands over what drives men to do evil things and always telling us that horrible things could happen at any moment. Basically, neither man seems to give a shit about being “on message”. Uncle Ruslan was angry and appalled by the bombing. He didn’t somberly pontificate on what drove his nephews to kill and maim a bunch of innocent folk. He was outraged and said so. Charles Ramsey didn’t worry about whether someone would think his comments were racially insensitive. He was dumfounded by what had happened and said so.

More of this, please. Life isn’t scripted. Why should everything in the media be?